Ex-Spies Blast Today's Spooks for Qaeda Breach

Former spies are blasting their former colleagues for blowing the cover of a private investigation into Al-Qaeda's "intranet." Rita Katz, head of the jihadist-monitoring SITE Institute, says her operation was compromised hours after she gave the White House and the National Counterterrorism Center an advance look at an Osama Bin Laden online video.

On his blog Haft of the Spear, signals and human intelligence veteran Michael Tanji says "without a doubt SITE is justified in feeling like the gov’t screwed things up."

While it is tough to point a finger at the exact leaker, the phenomenon of every swinging Richard - people who should know better - rushing to download the associated files is a problem that has long plagued those of us who dealt with these issues. It got to the point that we would stop providing URLs and other identifying information in reports because some wingnut from a gov’t IP would go to the target site and voila! It would suddenly disappear. Indication #1 that the adults are not working the [online jihadist] problem.

This also reinforced my earlier statements about the sophistication of our adversary and the value of these sites... Paranoia was thick before, now it is worse. Control and authentication will get more strict and penetration will become more difficult. Strangers will need more bona fides. Loose lips and all that; indication #2 that the adults are not working this mission.

It would be nice to think that this was an organized effort by our Uncle to disrupt AQ online, but given the relative ease associated with monitoring ‘Net comms over, say, anonymous and constantly changing throw-away mobiles or tracking a courier in a sea of guys all dressed and acting alike, it runs against an age-old intelligence tenant: you drive people to the medium you are best suited to exploit, you don’t drive them to use mechanisms you cannot. Indicator #3.

The normally government-friendly "Spook86" agrees over at In From the Cold, saying that "Ms. Katz is rightfully upset." But he takes away a different message from the incident than Tanji does. Spook86
believes that Katz should have never trusted "an intelligence community that leaks like a sieve and is always looking for plausible cover to protect its own collection efforts."

By providing the video to the government, she gave the spooks a chance to claim victory, without affecting the sources and methods that likely yielded the tape... It's a given that the intel community was already aware of the production, and looking for a way to publicize their "coup" without compromising its collection techniques. Enter Ms. Katz.

Fact is, the intel community knows far more about Al Qaida communications than most people realize--and that fact isn't widely publicized, for obvious reasons... While the nation's intel apparatus is certainly capable of gross buffoonery, it's unlikely that any mid or high-level official would be willing to "blow" Obelisk [the jihadist's intranet] unless they had other, better means for accessing Al Qaida communications -- avenues that wouldn't be compromised by media coverage of the bin Laden video. Presumably, those 'access points" are still available and producing valuable intelligence--as evidenced by last month's arrests in Europe.

Let's assume Spook86 is right, that the officials have other windows into the online jihadist community. Let's assume that this intranet was actually one of the *less *informative points of access. Even so, you'd only want to compromise it for a damn good reason, right? If so, does getting an early headline qualify?